ITS LONG AND ABUNDANT HAIR.
Claimed much of its attention, and after a while it sailed away and was lost to sight. On the same coast, in 1827, a young man was attracted to a cavern by a screeching noise, and on looking in was startled at the sight of a number of figures staring at him from the water—figures half fish, half human, with large beaming eyes, streaming hair, and long and slender arms and hands. At him they stared, but only for a moment, and then disappeared. The following day he discovered five mermaids, old and young, in the same place; the adults sleeping on the rocks and the young playing in the water.
A MERMAID, ABOUT THREE FEET LONG.
Caight is the Gull of Sauchio, Ægean sea, in 1774, was exhibited in London in a dried state. Its neck was well shaped, its breast was full, or apparently had been ; the ears, which were like eel’s ears, were, placed like human ears ; the hair’an unusual occurrence—was scanty, and the creature seemed to rely, for the chief ornament of its head, on a membrane or fin that arose from the temples and formed a pyramidal topknot. From the waist down it was essentially the figure of a cod-fish, save that it had three sets of fins, so placed as to enable it to sit erect in the water. Edmund Burke is said to have expressed the opinion after examining this specimen, that it was the veritable thing. The Rev. Dr. Phillips, a representative of the London Missionary Society at Capetown, had an opportunity.
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TO INSPECT A MERMAID.
IN 1822, owned by Captain Eades, on board of an American ship bound for Boston. Captain Eades said he had paid $5,000 for it, and that he had been offered double that sum for it. It had been caught by some Chinese fishermen, who sold it for a trifle, and each time that it had changed hands it had been bought at an advance. Dr. Phillips, after a careful examination, found that its teeth were very regular, eight incisors, four canine, and eight molars, the canine like those of an ape or a well-grown dog. There were other points of resemblance to an ape or a baboon : “ But from what I saw,” concludes the gentleman, “I have no doubt that it has clavicles—an appendage belonging to the human subject, which baboons are without, and this is strong reason that this is not a made up affair.”
Captain Eades took his prize to London in the ship Lion, where Dr. Reese Price, a gentleman distinguished for his scientific attainments, said that “ the introduction of the animal into this country will form AN INTERESTING ERA IN NATURAL HISTORY.”
In conclusion he adds : “When examining this singular phenomenon, what excited my astonishment most was the external covering for the chest upward to be such an exact representation of that of the human being, while the whole of the body below was enveloped with the scaly covering of a fish.”
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